Will AI Replace Designers
The Future of Car Design: From Sketchpad to AI Imagination
Welcome back to a new Article. As we all know, the automotive industry is constantly evolving and it’s constantly improving. But have you ever wondered what the future of car design holds? Well, I wonder no more because T-to-I, text-to-image, generators, as well as artificial intelligence are here to shake things up.
If you’ve been living underneath a rock, you might have missed the latest technology that allows you to simply enter a text prompt and receive an incredible result back in just a matter of seconds. Gone are the days of tedious and time-consuming sketching and rendering. With T to I, such as DALI and Mid Journey, car designers can simply input a written description of the desired design, and voila, a fully rendered and detailed model appears before their very eyes without even a big pen lifted.
I learned how to draw and design cars while sitting on the lot of my father’s car dealership. For years, I observed and sketched all of the different shapes, sizes, all the different styles. It took me over a decade to learn how to design my own cars with my own ideas and my own style.
I think if you were to go back and tell me as an eight-year-old that all I needed to do was imagine something and that a computer would create it, I think my head would have exploded. For my generation, this is truly the future we were told to expect. If you’ve ever imagined what a Frankenstein of a Mini Cooper and a McLaren P1 could look like, well, imagine no more.
AI Spills the Beans: Will the Future of Car Design Be Imagined or Generated?
Ever wondered what it would look like if IKEA decided to release a new car? Even what would it look like, perhaps, if Picasso or even Sid Mead had designed a BMW? These thought experiments are a bit of fun and can entertain pretty much everybody. But what does this actually mean for the industry? For starters, car designers can now spend more time evolving the details of their designs rather than spending hours sketching them out. The machine only takes material and puts it where it’s needed.
With the ability to quickly generate and test out different designs, we may see more unique and innovative car designs hitting the market. Heck, we might even be able to improve some designs that already exist. This is definitely a tool that BMW could have used when coming up with the identity for their new grilles.
Furthermore, brands could run pre-conceptualization design phases just to see what segments they could expand to in the future. For example, we know that McLaren is one of the only luxury car manufacturers that doesn’t have an SUV in their lineup. Luckily, we don’t have to wait for that.
We don’t have to wait for McLaren to do it. We can just pull up the T2i generator and see what a McLaren SUV crossover might look like. Let’s put these side-by-side with some real-life human artist impressions of what a McLaren SUV could look like, and then it’s over to you in the comments down below to let me know which ones make you more excited.
AI Design Revolution: Boon or Bane for Car Design Creativity?
This tool isn’t just used to imagine even what a Ferrari hatchback could look like. It can also be used to push brands into segments that they don’t even currently make. For example, EV tools are going to be the next huge vehicular jump in the next, say, ten years.
So it’s not unrealistic that every car brand perhaps might want to make their own EV tool. Lamborghini might even want to try making their own motorbikes again in the future. But I digress.
Back to cars. This tool isn’t just limited to the overall style or shape of a car. We can also use it to zoom in and hyperfocus on details such as interior styling, wheel design, headlight innovation, and much, much more.
We can also use it for sketching, blueprints, and anything basically that has to show almost the done-by-hand or the human touch approach. This is, I’m sure we can all agree, a huge advancement in our world of creativity. However, as with any technological advancement, there are potential downsides.
For one, T2i generators may lead to a marginalization of car designs as car designers tend to rely on them too much to generate their concepts. This is something that’s already prevalent in our world of creativity, even without the use of T2i. One potential plus point for using T2i is that all the neural networks are actually taught on images that are historical, which means that all the images have a strong link to things that have already existed in the world.
Doubts Emerge: Can AI Replace the Human Touch in Car Design?
This is going to make it almost impossible to design something from a brand that doesn’t have, let’s say, the aesthetic identity built into the design just because of the way it works. Another downside, let’s not forget, is the potential loss of jobs as the need for car designers decreases in the future. In every project that I’ve worked on, the designers have had to make sacrifices for the people in suits, who are mostly interested in saving as many pennies as they can.
It wouldn’t surprise me if Mark started to reduce the number of designers that they employ and instead lead the design of cars up to the democracy of a focus group. There’s also a loss of a basic skill like sketching. As we move further into our digital epoch, we stray further away from the intimate ability to sketch our ideas and further from all the mistakes that we can learn from along the way.
When I was tasked with designing the BMW X5, I drew the first thumbnail sketch of it on the back of a napkin on a plane on the way to Turin. A couple of imperfections on that sketch were imperative to the overall design of that car, and those mistakes could have only come from my mind, controlling the pen and trying my best to express an idea. Though these artificial tools might be efficient and might be relieving, I’m extremely grateful that they didn’t exist when I was coming up through the industry.
AI may be able to generate a wide variety of designs and obviously improve or offer ways to improve existing designs, but ultimately, it’s up to humans to evaluate these options and make the decisions. Moreover, AI is not able to fully encompass the complexity of human emotions. It does not understand taste, and so in this regard, it needs to be controlled or at least analyzed by humans in order to make the final correct, let’s call it decision.
AI Assistant: Partner or Replacement in Car Design? Exploring the Future Landscape
In conclusion, AI may make the design process more efficient, but ultimately, it will not replace the creativity and expertise of human car designers; rather, it will work alongside human designers to create more efficient and more innovative cars. If nothing else, I do believe that the more tools that empower people to get into car design, the better. I also believe that with the rise of other technologies like 3D printing, we’re not too many years away from independent car brands, where people are using all available technology to create their own kit cars and sell them.
This, I believe, is a huge plus point because the future that we should be heading into is one where people are inspired and empowered to create. I, for one, already love what people are starting to create. I can’t wait to see what it evolves into in the future.
Now, if you truly want to know just how incredible AI technology is, you should know that the majority of this script has been written by an AI program called ChatGPT. Now, if you look back at this article and you notice where this icon is, that part of the script has been artificially generated. Of course, we knew what we wanted to say, and only our prompts could have generated the script that we wanted to see.
The challenge of scripting this whole article with an AI bot is one that it handled with ease. Now, as a slight caveat, I did ask ChatGPT what its list of top 10 car designers of all time is, and I wasn’t on that list, so maybe we shouldn’t really trust everything that it says. Thanks so much for watching, and I’ll see you in the future.
- Will AI Replace Car Designers?
- Will AI Replace Car Designers?
- Will AI Replace Car Designers?
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